South America is experiencing its worst wildfire season in two decades, with millions of acres of land burned in several countries. The fires come amid the region’s worst drought on record, and come as no surprise to meteorologists who have predicted the event for decades.
satellite Data analyzed by the Brazilian space research institute INPE A record 346,112 fires have burned in 13 South American countries so far this year, blanketing large swaths of the continent with smoke. NASA satellite captures plume from a million miles away.
About 59 percent of Brazil, the continent’s largest country, an area about half the size of the United States, is facing drought conditions, and rivers in the Amazon basin are at their lowest levels ever. Of the six vast ecosystems that define Brazil, three are drought-stricken and burning: the Amazon, the Cerrado, and the Pantanal.
“We are facing the worst drought in history,” said Ane Alencar, scientific director at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute. The fires are the most intense since 2005 and will continue until the rains come, she said. That usually comes in October but there is no longer a guarantee. “We don’t know if the rains will come.”
The immediate causes of the ongoing carnage are deliberate fires that spread through the forest and a naturally occurring El Niño weather pattern that creates dry conditions, but experts say the compounding effects of climate change are making the crisis far worse, and the results are consistent with what scientists have warned could become the norm.
“This is exactly what every climate model has predicted for the last 20 years or more,” said Steve Schwarzman, senior director of forest policy at the Environmental Defense Fund. Erica de Berenguer César, a tropical forest ecologist at Lancaster University in the UK, worries that without dramatic action, people may one day look back on 2024 as just another year. “It’s going to get a lot, a lot worse.”
Scientists say Global warming It’s already a major factor The ongoing drought is being driven more by El Niño than by Latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate ChangeSeasonal droughts in the region are “projected to become 12 to 30 percent longer, 17 to 42 percent more intense, and 21 to 42 percent more frequent” by the end of the century.
Dry weather means drier forests, too. When ranchers and farmers set fires to clear land, they’re more likely to get out of control. Indigenous communities have used small fires to manage the land for centuries, Alencar noted, but forests were moist enough that fires were largely contained. Climate change is changing that reality, and “human-caused fires can really have a big impact,” he said.
Deforestation is now a leading cause of forest fires, especially in the Amazon. Not only does clearing land increase the opportunities for fires to spread, but losing 2.5 million square miles of the Amazon means losing a vital carbon sink for planet-warming emissions, further exacerbating the climate change that exacerbates fire risk.
“It seems to me that the situation is getting worse every year,” said Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. On a recent trip to drought-stricken Amazonas stateAll 62 municipalities in the country have declared states of emergency, with more than 340,000 people reportedly affected.
Lula’s government came to power in 2023 promising to crack down on illegal deforestation in the Amazon, which reached unprecedented levels under his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro. Although deforestation has dropped dramatically, rainforest continues to shrink as people continue to set and spread fires.
One thing that sets the Amazon fires apart from those raging in other parts of the world, such as the American West, is that they are primarily human-caused. Another difference is the biological scale of what’s at stake: The Amazon is home to 10 percent of the world’s biodiversity and a fifth of its freshwater, and it was never meant to burn.
“They have never burned, and they have never coexisted with fire,” said Guillermo Villalobos, a political scientist specializing in climate science at the Bolivian nonprofit Fundación Solon. He told ABC News“This is very tragic for the ecosystem and the world.”
